In 1980, a guy named George W. S. Trow, who I think was an editor at The New Yorker, published an article in The New Yorker called “Within the Context of No Context.” In the article, he talks about TV:

                                              TELEVISION

Television has a scale. It has other properties, but what television has to a dominant degree is a certain scale and the power to enforce it. No one has been able to describe the scale as it is experienced. We know some of its properties, though.

Television does not vary. The trivial is raised up to power in it. The powerful is lowered toward the trivial.

The power behind it resembles the power of no-action, the powerful passive.

It is bewitching.

It interferes with growth, conflict, and destruction, and these forces are different in its presence.

“Entertainment” is an unsatisfactory word for what it encloses or projects or makes possible.

No good has come of it. (45)

And later (and I realize this is a lot of quoting and a lot of reading that wasn’t assigned, but I think [maybe] that it’s important), I promise that I’ll relate it to Chun eventually…

What is it? It’s television. It’s a program on television. A little span of time. How does it work? It’s a little span of time made friendly by repetition. In a way, it doesn’t exist at all. Just what does, then? A certain ability to transmit and receive and then to apply layers of affection and longing and doubt. Two abilities: to do a very complex kind of work, involving electrons, and then to cover the coldness of that with a hateful familiarity. Why hateful? Because it hasn’t anything to do with a human being as a human being is strong. It has to do with a human being as a human being is weak and willing to be fooled: the human being’s eagerness to perceive as warm something that is cold, for instance; his eagerness to be a part of what one cannot be a part of, to love what cannot be loved” (59-60).

Okay. So Chun argues that “software was transformed form a service in time to a product” (7). Putting aside that television went through an identical development, Chun also suggests that “Software…is a response to and product of changing relations between subjects and objects” and that, according to Foucault, government is “a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons” (7). So I would argue that Chun’s characterization of software sounds an awful lot like the characterization of television a mere three decades ago.

I’m still working through this and trying to get this post up before the deadline, but I think what I’m suggesting is that software has enabled computers to supplant television as the dominant mode or method of suggestion and influence and that subject and object were indeterminate in terms of relationality at least as long ago as the 1980s, which is when we saw the infancy of reality TV – when the distance between subject and object started to blur. And then now we have celebrities who are celebrities exclusive to Youtube or Instagram, or whatever, and the middle ground has become (is becomming?) increasingly tenuous.

Now I’m starting to confuse myself. I’m not really sure what I was getting at here. I think it has something to do with the shrinking boundaries between the human and the digital and software creating us, but I’ve kind of lost that thread.